Biography

Art is at the heart of the life of Émilie Leblanc Kromberg, a Canadian multidisciplinary artist from Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec. A 2006 graduate in jewellry-making from the École des métiers du Sud-Ouest-de-Montréal, the jeweller founded élk jewellry in 2010. Her studies in fine arts at the AKI Academy of Art & Design in the Netherlands in 2019 helped her develop a more conceptual artistic approach. The award-winning artist’s primary focus is the link between objects and memory. Now based in Nelson, British Columbia, Émilie Leblanc Kromberg is involved in her community, leading art workshops and on the Council of the Oxygen Art Centre and participating in projects and exhibitions. She is also interested in art retreats, which are ideal spaces to nurture her creativity.

Artist Statement

My practice investigates how meaning, memory, and identity shift through material transformation, repetition, and disappearance. Working across sculpture, installation, animation, and sound, I use familiar objects, images, and personal mementos as starting points, then subject them to processes that strip away specificity in favor of collective recognition or gradual loss.

Central to my approach is the translation of forms across materials and contexts. Whether reducing domestic objects to archetypes, reproducing images until they degrade, or allowing unkilned clay works to erode over time, the work foregrounds how repetition, exposure, and material fragility alter perception. These processes mirror the way memories are formed, distorted, and eventually fade.

By removing permanence and control—through weather, touch, copying, or accumulation—the work invites viewers to encounter each piece at a different moment in its transformation. The practice resists fixed narratives, instead emphasizing experience as temporary and contingent. Across these works, memory becomes both subject and method: something constructed, shared, eroded, and continually reconfigured through material and time.